In any case, this all makes me a bit
reluctant to comment on the video and the song, lest my [totally
subjective, relatively unimportant] voice be added to the cacophony
of value-laden, definitive pronouncements already out there about
What This Video Means. But on the other hand, I always write about
things like six months after everyone else has stopped caring about
them, so I figured I'd seize the opportunity to write about current
events when they're actually current.

In short, I agree with the people who
are excited about a pop star's open embrace of what it means to be
black in the US in 2016, from physical traits to music to food to
funny cultural quirks to the specific challenges and oppression
facing the community, without her worrying about projecting one
monolithic, coherent image of blackness (because such a thing doesn't
really exist).

As for my personal reaction to the
video, I really liked it visually. It captures a sort of Southern
Gothic aesthetic that has been latent in a lot of music for the past
decade or two, but it makes this aesthetic explicit and conscious and
intentional. The end product is slick and sexy and abrasive, and
very eccentric. The tune isn't that catchy—it isn't in my head
today after watching the video last night. Just to show you how
not-catchy it is, what's in my head is Ciara's “One Two Step”,
which I probably haven't heard or thought about in ten years. I
guess “Formation” somehow reminded me of it musically. In general, I don't
much care for the sound of most black pop music today—heavy on
distorted electronic beats, lots of Autotune, slow chanting,
everything very synthetic and inorganic. I think this is what people
refer to as Southern-style trap music (which if I understand
correctly has its even less charming but somehow more authentic—for
me—cousin in the cold, stripped down drill music of Chicago). If
Beyonce's video is intriguing, stylish Southern Gothic, much of Chicago's new drill wave
is gray, depressing DeathGoth like the Crow, or maybe even some less-polished straight-to-video
sequel of the Crow. Dark and sad and cold and post-industrial, with
an active aversion to any flash that might make the Gothic seem elegant.

I now realize that I have long had a
kneejerk aversion to the Southern tilt of rap music and black popular
culture since the 1990s. I just can't get on board with the
car-dependent, AC-addicted suburban sprawl of the Sun Belt, black or
white, and I guess I subconsciously worried that granting any
validity to the resurgence of Southern prominence in national black
cultural discourse meant that I was legitimizing the abandonment of
the Rust Belt and the suburbanization of the US. I like Outkast and
the Goodie Mob, but I don't even like the concept of Atlanta. I
don't like its sprawl, its unrepentant, unconscious segregation, its
open embrace by black and white of bourgeois consumerist values. And
I certainly don't like how it's drawn so many black
ascendant professionals away from Chicago!

In any case, I recognize that my
distaste for this music is just a subjective aesthetic preference,
and my boosterism of all things Chicago (even our murder rate is
better than yours) certainly colors my judgment here. And to be
honest, given the choice between Chief Keef's “Don't Like” video
of a bunch of teenage dudes jumping around to music in a house, or
Beyonce's ultra-polished, beautiful production of Formation, I'd much
prefer the latter. So in summary, yay for Beyonce on “Formation”.

One last note on what Formation made me
think of. Much of the video and the song is an explicit,
self-conscious, proud, and sometimes defiant series of in-group
references to black customs and idiosyncracies—hot sauce, Red
Lobster, natural and fake hair, designer labels, etc. This seems to be
powerful, inspiring imagery for the video's black audience, and I can
understand that. Insofar as this resounding reception of the video
represents a given ethnic group celebrating and reclaiming its
identity, this is a great thing.

But it can also border on the tacky or
the pandering (though obviously not as noxious or destructive as right-wing
politicians' call to “traditional” white values to easily win
over an audience). It reminds me of something I see a lot in the US,
across both black and white cultures, which is a parochial self-centeredness,
an underlying lack of value for or awareness of the rest of the
world, that arises naturally from living in the world's most powerful
country. I feel that when any group in the US is too centered on
itself, it implicitly comes at a cost to the rest of the world since,
like it or not, our country bears such a heavy weight in world
culture, politics, and economy. So while I see the importance of
vindicating black identity and simply the right of blacks to live
with dignity in the white-dominated US, I hope that Beyonce and the
audience she is addressing with Formation don't become so smitten
with the admitted beauty and fun and verve of their own culture that
they forget that their struggle needs to also be tied up with other
struggles in the world.

Just as much of organized black dissent
to the injustice in the US amounts to a call for more consciousness
and carefulness on the part of oblivious whites who by their very
unawareness perpetuate and strengthen a system that hurts others, I
feel that blacks and whites and everyone else in the US need to be
more conscious of the problems that our behaviors and our politics
and our beliefs can cause, are causing, in the rest of the world. I'm
sure eating at Red Lobster may be an experience or a signifier that
rings true for a lot of black folk in the US, but if that particular
chain restaurant, and industrialized, protein-heavy diets in general
cause irreversible ecological harm, rely on slave-labor-heavy value
chains, and undermine locally-owned, non-franchise business, then
none of us can be content to merely muse at how cute and culturally relevant it is,
or how much it makes us feel an in-group solidarity. Ditto for Southern
sprawl and car culture, ditto for a consumerist fashion culture,
ditto for many other traits of black popular culture that Beyonce makes
reference to in Formation. And certainly ditto for the equivalent
white US cultural signifiers—meat-laden barbecues, suburban sprawl
underlain by fear and hatred of minorities, oversized everything from
TVs to cars to serving sizes, a dedication to rugged individualism
that borders on a pathological aversion to other human beings. These things may
seem to bolster our particular cultures, and to give us satisfaction
and meaning for the group identity they provide us, but if they come
at the expense of others, we can't celebrate them uncritically.

This is not Beyonce's problem to deal
with, nor is it the problem of black folks writ large in the US to
solve (nor is it any given US white person's problem to solve alone).
It's just something we all need to think about more. I don't know
that I've done a very good job with it myself; I have as yet been unable to
wholeheartedly join the battle against any of the very real problems
that affect our communities in the US, both black and white (bad
diets, economic inequality, lack of political representation,
violence, hatred, racism, etc.), because I can't get past the idea
that my suffering compatriots are at the same time and each in their own way themselves oppressors, often of people living thousands of miles away in entirely different contexts. So I always feel stuck
between a drive to work with the Third World poor, and applying my talents to try to improve life in my home country. The former feels worthwhile but
lacks both the glamour of highly-publicized and mediatized US
problems, as well as the resonance for me of working with my own
people (not to mention that I'd surely be more effective working with
people from my own culture than from distant countries).

At any rate, a big thanks to Beyonce
for giving me and millions of others some food for thought.